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[ by Charles Cameron ]

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Aaron Weisburd has posted a screen-grab of “Abu Reyyan” the Frankfurt Shooter‘s FaceBook page at Internet Haganah

Naturally enough, the name of the second friend listed in the left-hand column, Imam Mahdi Hans, caught my eye. Here’s a screen grab of part of Hans’ own Facebook page, showing his self-image to better advantage:

Okay, I’ve seen that image before — in fact, I blogged about it on my old Forensic Theology site, towards the bottom of a long post, and yes — the image clever Hans is using is a blend of Osama with Obama, and includes a credit to “Phil Dragoo”.  And yes, Hans himself does claim to be the Mahdi on his FB page.

It’s probably just a joke, and a bit of a sideswipe at the Shi’a, Obama, and no doubt the CIA — but since I noticed the connection, and Aaron doesn’t have comments enabled, I thought I should mention it here…

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UPDATE:

Aaron has kindly pointed out to me that there’s a second Mahdi among Abu Reyyan’s friends: Imam Mahdi Franz.

Like Hans, Franz’ avatar is a mashup of two images to generate a face presumably intended to represent bin Laden, but with the features of a US President: in the first case, Obama, and in the second, Bush 43.

In this case, the mashup is one that you’ll find on the cover of Tariq Ali‘s book, Clash of Fundamentalisms (the British hardback has the best version of the image; the US edition credits it to “Mister Hepburn / Slab”.

Here’s where it gets doubly interesting to me:

First, the pair of them taken together make a fine example of the anti-Shi’a strand in Salafism, picking up on the eschatology — which I don’t think they’d be doing quite like that if they felt a strong Salafi-Mahdist current themselves.

So that’s another data point in terms of the strength of what J-P Filiu calls “Apocalypse in Islam” – in Germany, Shi’ite Mahdism can be mocked by Salafis.

.. and second, for bonus points… the two pages are also pretty strongly “twinned” – Mahdi to Mahdi, Hans to Franz, Obama to Bush – so they’re also a great fit for my more playful side, suggesting an obvious example of my DoubleQuotes genre:

[ by Charles Cameron ]

Okay, don’t take this one too seriously:

I’m a big fan of Frank Herbert‘s Dune, and the news that there’s now a Goodnight Dune version for kids on the web caught me off guard and carried me away…

Hat tip to Bryan Alexander of Infocult

[ by Charles Cameron ]

Excellent news!  COL Patrick Lang has now signed up on Twitter, so a quick and easy way to know when he’s posted at Sic Semper Tyrranis is to follow him @pat_lang. I hope he’ll post the occasional quick comment on — or pointer to — breaking news there, too.

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Okay, that’s the main message here — but there’s also an amusing aside to be made.

I tend to pride myself (I’m afraid that’s probably the right word) on my humility — so you can imagine how I felt when I discovered earlier today that Twitter was doing my humility for me:

That’s right: as a follower of COL Lang, I rate precisely zero.

Humility by twitter — is our technology getting wise to us at last?

[ by Charles Cameron ]

The first “quote” in this pair is a clever, geeky commentary on the situation in Egypt from shortly before the fall of Mubarak.

The second is a screen capture made today from the official Egyptian Presidency site — virtuality meets reality.

[ This post is a follow-up to my earlier DoubleQuote Egypt: uninstalling ]

[ by Charles Cameron ] Zombies! Can’t live without them! Sources: Ursula Lindsey — Steve Benen